Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

I’ve got two stories in the recent issue of Eleven Eleven: “Feeding the Skeleton Cats” and “Tornado Season.”

I wrote “Tornado Season” during, well, tornado season, after obsessively checking the TorCon and worrying over the arrival of my storm shelter, after crouching in my hallway with a mattress pad over my head while tornado sirens sounded, after setting up five weather alerts on my phone. I’m terrified of storms. To try to take some of the power out of that fear, I wrote a story, an exercise in free writing, about a couple in a weather-ravaged post-apocalypse trying to escape the weather and their memory.

I wrote “Feeding the Skeleton Cats” as a third in a skeletons series (“Skeletons” and “The Mammoth” are the other two stories). Every time I thought I was done writing about walking, living skeletons as metaphor, I come back to them. I’m not scared of skeletons, but I am scared of failing as a writer, and the main character in this story is a failed writer whose house is infested with the skeleton cats of the title.

Read them both here: http://elevenelevenjournal.com/2015/11/04/bonnie-stufflebeam/